India's most powerful rural entrepreneurs

India's most powerful rural entrepreneurs

Mansukhbhai Jagani, Madanlal Kumawat, Mansukhbhai Patel, Chintakindi Mallesham and Mansukhbhai Prajapati are among Forbes's list of seven most powerful rural Indian entrepreneurs, whose "inventions are changing lives" of the people across the country.

India's most powerful rural entrepreneurs

IIM-Ahmedabad professor and founder of India's Honeybee Network, Anil Gupta, has selected the seven most powerful rural Indian entrepreneurs for a compilation in Forbes magazine.

"India's villages have become a hot bed of innovation, as its rural poor develop inventions out of necessity. Several of the people on this list have no more than an elementary school education," Gupta says.

India's most powerful rural entrepreneurs

Mansukhbhai Jagani developed a motorcycle-based tractor for India's poor farmers, which is both cost effective - costing roughly $ 318, and fuel efficient (it can plow an acre of land in 30 minutes with two liters of fuel).

After 4-5 years of experiments, Mansukhbhai developed an attachment for a motorbike -- a multi-purpose tool bar -- in 1994. This could be attached to any 325cc motorcycle by replacing the rear wheel with an assembly unit.

The 'super plough' called Bullet Santi (a cultivator that pulverizes or smoothens the soil is locally called as santi), can carry out various farming activities like furrow opening, sowing, inter-culturing and spraying operations.

You can send an e-mail to Mansukhbhai, e-mail at info@nifindia.orgMobile number: 99254 47400

India's most powerful rural entrepreneurs

Mansukhbhai Prajapati, a potter, invented a clay non-stick pan that costs Rs 100 and a clay refrigerator that runs without electricity for those who cannot afford a fridge or their electricity and maintenance costs, Gupta said.

During the 2001 earthquake, all earthen pots were broken. "Some people told me the poor people's refrigerators are broken. They referred to the 'matkas'(pots) as refrigerators. It struck me then that I must try to make a fridge for those who cannot afford to buy a fridge," says Prajapati.

The patent winning Mitticool has been the most challenging product for him. It needed a lot of experimenting. He started work on it in 2001, the product was finally ready by 2004.

In 2005,he started the non-stick tava (pan) business. "My wife could not buy a non-stick tava as it was costly. So I thought many people would be facing the same problem. That's when I designed the non-stick tavas, priced between Rs 50-100," he says.

India's most powerful rural entrepreneurs

Madanlal Kumawat, a grassroots innovator with no more than a fourth-grade education, developed a fuel-efficient, multi-crop thresher that yields cleaner grains, which can be bagged directly and eliminates the cost of cleaning.

The modified thresher reduces setup time to less than 15 minutes to switch over from one crop to another. Its latest variant can also handle groundnuts apart from threshing other cereals and pulses.

India's most powerful rural entrepreneurs

Mallesham's machine can make six saris worth of material in one day, and "no human effort is required beyond placing thread on the machine and removing the material after the process is complete."

Weavers making the traditional 'Tie & Dye' Pochampalli silk sarees used to undergo a painstaking process, moving their hands thousands of times in a day while weaving sarees. But not any more.

Thanks to Mallesham's patented device to mechanise this process, hundreds of weavers in Andhra Pradesh now spend less time on making a variety of designs.

There are 30,000 women weavers in Andhra Pradesh who continue to do the weaving process manually as they cannot afford to buy the Laxmi Asu machine. They are looking for help as the government has failed to extend any kind of support.